Bringing OCX Africa to Lagos was a personal and career highlight for me.
I was born in Lesotho, and have spent much of my career working in technology and open source around the world. So standing on stage in Lagos and welcoming developers from across Africa to the first OCX Africa felt particularly meaningful.
But what made the experience special wasn’t simply bringing an Eclipse Foundation event to Africa. In fact, that was never really the point.
When our team first came to Lagos for OSCAFest in 2025, we were struck by the energy, ambition, and creativity of the community. We left knowing we wanted to come back. But we also knew we didn’t want to take an event designed somewhere else, drop it into Lagos and call it OCX Africa. We wanted to build something with the community there. For me, that was about more than how we organized the event. It was about how we viewed the community itself.
Too often, conversations about technology in Africa and other parts of the Global South are framed around the “next billion users” or consumers. It’s time to change that framing. We should be thinking about the next million innovators, maintainers, entrepreneurs, and creators.
Our State of Open Source in the Global South research found that 37% of developers surveyed across 18 countries were already contributing to open source, 28% were maintainers, and 22% had created their own open source projects. Nearly 60% strongly agreed that open source would play an important role in their country’s economic growth over the coming decade.
Look beyond Africa and the same broader movement is visible. According to GitHub’s 2026 Octoverse report, India now has 32 million developers on GitHub, second only to the United States, while Brazil has more than 10 million. India added more than 10 million developers over the past year, and Brazil added 3.28 million. These are no longer emerging developer communities at the margins of the global ecosystem. They’re helping shape its future.
The centre of gravity of the developer world is changing and OCX Africa made this feel very real.
Over two days, I met so many creative, energetic, and inspiring people. And what struck me wasn’t simply interest in open source, but the sophistication of the conversations and the desire to build.
Rasheedat Atinuke Jamiu made AI agents understandable through wonderfully accessible explanations and demonstrations. Victor Olamide Akande showed Eclipse Enclave being used to safely run autonomous AI coding agents. Mary Mbaoma demonstrated a secure AI-powered cloud IDE built with Eclipse Theia and Google Cloud. Moses Ogunranti Adebayo showed what open source IoT and fabrication can mean for African makers.
Babáṣílé Daniel Ọládélé-Emmanuel shared lessons from a decade of building open source communities across Nigeria, North and West Africa, while Ruth Ikegah, Samson Goddy, and Adeyinka Oresanya contributed to an important conversation about African talent, global impact, and the age of AI.
And my colleague Frédéric Desbiens got people building hands-on with Eclipse ThreadX. Thomas Froment led a hands-on workshop exploring how developers can build and understand their own AI coding environments, from large language models to AI agents, bringing together technologies including Theia AI, Enclave, the Open VSX Registry, and our new AI Registry, currently in preview.
Those conversations reinforced something else for me. There are enormous opportunities for African developers and communities not just in software, but in areas such as AI, open hardware, embedded systems, and trust and security. These are technologies that will shape economies and societies everywhere. The people helping shape them should come from everywhere too.
That’s why I describe OCX Africa as connecting ecosystems. We weren’t “bringing open source to Africa.” Open source is already there. We were bringing open source communities closer together, with knowledge, ideas, projects and opportunities flowing in both directions.
Now comes the important part.
The success of OCX Africa won’t ultimately be measured by what happened during those two days. It will be measured by what happens afterwards: the first contribution, the new collaboration, the project someone discovers, the community someone joins, or perhaps a new technology created in Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Kigali, Cape Town, or somewhere else that eventually gets used around the world.
We want to stay engaged. We want to keep listening. And we want the people we met in Lagos to become increasingly connected with communities across the Eclipse Foundation and the wider global open source ecosystem.
If what you’ve read here about OCX Africa has sparked your curiosity, I encourage you to explore the projects, technologies, and resources from the event.
If you have something to teach, a problem you solved, a project you’re building, or a community story worth sharing, consider submitting a talk for OCX 2027 in Brussels. As I said to many of the people I met in Lagos: your story belongs on stage.
And if you have a story about what open source means in your country or community, I would also encourage you to contribute it to Open Source Global Voices. We need more of those perspectives to be visible globally.
I am enormously grateful to Open Source Community Africa, particularly Ruth Ikegah, Samson Goddy and the wider OSCA community, for building this with us. Thank you as well to our sponsors, Open VSX and Open Elements, and to every speaker, panelist, and volunteer who shared their time and knowledge.
And a huge thank you to my Eclipse Foundation colleagues who made the event possible: Aurélie, Amandine, Elspeth, Maira, Thomas, Frédéric, and Natalia. People travelled from Canada, Belgium, and France to be there, but more importantly, they came ready to listen, learn and build relationships.
As I said in my closing remarks, and firmly believe: this is not the finish line. It’s the starting point.
The future of open source is global.
And after these two days in Lagos, I am more convinced than ever that Africa will help shape it.
